An interview by Jordan Riefe

It could be destiny that brought Domingo Hindoyan to the conductor's podium. Son of an accomplished violinist, he graduated from the renowned Venezuelan music program, El Sistema, whose many illustrious alumni include Gustavo Dudamel, a longtime friend. 

 “For me, music was part of normal life. At a very early stage, I started in the youth orchestra. My father was all about music, strong discipline, practice every day, orchestra rehearsal every day. I would go to a concert every week. So, for me, music, that was what it was all about.”  

 But succeeding James Conlon, LA Opera’s beloved music director who will step down this year, wasn’t the hand of destiny so much as it was the hand of President and CEO Christopher Koelsch, who keeps a running list of artists who have impressed him over the years.  

 “As we were coming to the end of James’ tenure, I accelerated the process of culling that list. Once we had a committee working in earnest, we were down to three people,” says Koelsch. “When I look back in my archives, I had made extensive notes about Domingo all the way back in 2015,” when he first saw Hindoyan conduct in Berlin. 

 Hindoyan hit a fork in the road during his teen years when he was accepted to both engineering and medical school. For a short time, he attended medical school, a short walk from the city’s most illustrious concert hall. In the end, music won out. 

 “I was always a hidden conductor,” he confesses, having picked up the baton for the first time at the age of 14 for Grieg’s Peer Gynt. “I always had this curiosity to go further, to see the whole picture. I used to take the score and go through recordings with it, so it was how I learned a little bit on my own.”  

 At the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève he received his master’s degree in conducting and was soon invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, where he worked with Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis at the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra.  

 Then came a chance meeting in Lucerne that might have sealed his fate. While attending a rehearsal of the touring Chicago Symphony, he was introduced to legendary conductor Daniel Barenboim, who asked about the origins of his name. He learned that Hindoyan’s mother was an Armenian from Syria. Eyeing his violin case, he asked the young man to play for him and invited him to join his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of mostly Middle Eastern musicians. “When I left the hall, I said, ‘What did I just do?” Hindoyan laughs. 

 He served as Barenboim’s first assistant conductor at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin from 2013 through 2016. “What I learned from him, to make the relationship between harmony, rhythm, your whole life, the emotion, the tempo, and the sound. I’m still learning today.” 

 Since then, his career has taken him to the world’s most prestigious opera houses and concert halls. In 2019, he became principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. A year later, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra made him chief conductor on a one-season contract that was later extended through 2028. 

 In between rehearsals and performances, there is life to be lived. Back in 2009, when he was a student in Geneva, he met soprano Sonya Yoncheva. The pair had been studying in the same building for six years but only met on her last day there. That encounter lit a match that became an inferno five years later when they married and had their first child, Mateo. The second, Sophia, came five years after that.  

 “We keep it well balanced, the family and the professional relationships,” he says of his home life. “We work together very rarely, which we both think is very healthy. But if the right project comes at the right moment, I expect to see her in LA.” 

 “Everything flows from his deep interest in connecting with human beings: the waiter, the security guards, the diva, the donors," says Koelsch. “It’s really powerful when the person who’s the lowest on that totem pole feels seen and valued. And it gets noticed all the way up.” 

 Hindoyan’s unofficial audition for the LA Opera job came last season with Romeo and Juliet,   his debut  here. “I just went for it,” he says of the well-reviewed performance. “I wanted to find complicity, as I do with every orchestra and opera house. I was demanding with the orchestra and they were reacting back and I felt at home. I wanted to know if the chemistry was going to be possible. And here we are.” 

 Hindoyan aims to commission new work and emphasize community outreach, mainly by adding an opera component to Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA). He also hopes to introduce “pocket operas,” short pieces running no more than 25 minutes, to make the medium more accessible.  

 “If we can provide excitement, then the audience will grow and donors will grow, and that’s what we have to create,” he says. “We have to be protectors of what we're doing, it’s very important. I will try to bring ideas and get to know the community and see what can be done. But I heard from two friends that if I want to set my imagination free, LA is the place to do it.” 

See Domingo Hindoyan make his LA Opera debut with Carmen; get tickets by   clicking here.